After 500 shows, ‘Simpsons’ still has stories to tell

LOS ANGELES – The Simpsons of Springfield, USA, will mark their 500th episode as a TV family Sunday. “The Simpsons,” in its 23rd season on Fox, is already the longest-running cartoon, the longest-running situation comedy and the longest-running scripted prime-time series in the history of American television.

There is something especially improbable about this particular household, with their goggle-eyes and cantilevered overbites and complexions betokening an advanced case of jaundice, claiming these crowns. And yet it is exactly in the spirit of the show, embedded in its seemingly contradictory quantum mechanics: They are losers who win, even as they lose, if for no other reason than they have one another. This remarkably stable long-term relationship is at once their horrible fate, and their good fortune.

“I had this vague idea of invading pop culture,” Oregon native Groening said of his early days in Los Angeles, which he chose over New York as the warmer, drier place to live in poverty while planning that coup. “I remember hanging out, just down this street, in Astro Burger with (artist friends) Gary Panter and Byron Werner and scheming how to do it. Gary had written an art manifesto about it and Byron said, no, that we were sellouts, as we split a burger three ways.”

And now: Three days after our lunch, Groening received a star on the Walk of Fame, to go with the one “The Simpsons” already holds. The art toy company Kidrobot, which produces a line of Simpsons figures, has now added one of their creator, holding a big pencil in one hand and a sketch of Homer Simpson in the other. A seventh season of his other cartoon series, “Futurama,” revived by Comedy Central after being canceled by Fox, is in production. And it was announced this week that, thanks to a $500,000 endowment, there is a Matt Groening Chair in Animation at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television.

“I think we were in the right place at the right time,” he said of the series’ long life and global reach. “Audiences were ready again for a prime-time animated TV show. We were the first out of the gate and, using a very conservative template of a family sitcom, found a way to tell jokes in many different styles, from slapstick to references I don’t even get. There are really obvious pratfalls and stuff taken from traditional cartoons, but there’s also a guest appearance by Thomas Pynchon. It’s really crazy that something so quirky is so popular, but whatever that mix is, it works.”

He recalled the company sitting down “for a table read of the 200th episode, and that was a staggering number. David Mirkin, one of the executive producers, said, ‘Well, we’re halfway home.’ And everybody laughed because it was obvious that there was no way we would be on for 400. So now to have done 500 is ... really fatiguing.”

If the series, developed with James L. Brooks and Sam Simon, is no longer at the center of the cultural discussion – “We’re not the new kid in town and haven’t been for a couple of decades now,” says Groening – it is because it has permeated the culture. It has seeped into the common soil, generating everything from toys (recently banned in Iran) and comics and trading cards to academic papers with titles like “‘The Simpsons Movie’: Critiques on Consumerism and Environmental Problems” and “Tones of Morality Through Layers of Sarcasm: The Simpsons and Its Underlying Themes.”

“I’ve been in a street market in Argentina where somebody took pieces of chalk and carved Simpsons figurines out of them,” says Groening, “and of course there are Simpsons Russian nesting dolls. Wherever you go, somebody has appropriated the thing, and it’s off-model and totally delightful.”

Even after half a thousand episodes, are there stories Groening wants to make sure to tell before the still-not-in-sight end?

“Mostly it’s revealing back stories of some of the characters we’ve never dealt with. We have a character we call Squeaky-Voiced Teen, which is (Dan) Castellaneta doing a 1940s Hollywood teenager. We’ve never given him a name; I’d like to know a little bit more about that guy.”